‘Hanrahan used to drink there,’ Hubert continued. ‘Many’s the time I saw him with a woman in the corner. I’ve forgotten if you said you remembered the late Hanrahan, Pam?’
She said she didn’t. Mrs Plunkett held out her cup and saucer for more tea. Pamela poured it.
‘Hanrahan painted the drain-pipes,’ Hubert said. ‘D’you remember that time, Pam?’
She shook her head. I wanted to tell him to stop. I wanted to remind him that he had already asked his cousin if she remembered Hanrahan painting the drain-pipes, to point out that it wasn’t she who had caused the difficulty that afternoon, that it wasn’t she who had made us stand there while grace was said again.
‘I’m surprised you don’t,’ Hubert said. ‘I’m really very surprised, Pam.’
Mrs Plunkett didn’t understand the conversation. She smiled kindly at me, and briefly indicated dishes I might like to help myself to. She lifted a forkful of cold chicken to her mouth.
‘It’s only that he mentioned you once in Dowd’s,’ Hubert said. He laughed, his eyes sparkling, as if with delight. ‘He asked how you were getting on one time. A very friendly man.’
Pamela turned away from the table, but she couldn’t hide what she wished to hide and she couldn’t control her emotions. Her cheeks were blazing now. She sobbed, and then she pushed her chair back and hurried from the room.
‘What have you said to her?’ Mrs Plunkett asked in astonishment.
I could not sleep that night. I kept thinking about Pamela, unhappy in her bedroom, and Hubert in his. I imagined Hubert’s father and Pamela’s mother, children in the house also, the bad son, the good daughter. I imagined the distress suffered in the house when Hubert’s father was accused of some small theft at school, which Hubert said he had been. I imagined the misdemeanour forgotten, a new leaf turned, and some time later the miscreant dunned by a debt collector for a sum he could not pay. Letters came to the house from England, pleading for assistance, retailing details of hardship due to misfortune. When I closed my eyes, half dreaming though I was not yet asleep, Mrs Plunkett wept, as Pamela had. She dreaded the letters, she sobbed; for a day or two she was able to forget and then another letter came. ‘I will write a cheque’: the man I had not seen spoke blankly, taking a cheque-book from his pocket and, at the breakfast table, writing it immediately.
I opened my eyes; I murmured Pamela’s name. ‘Pamela,’ I whispered because repeating it made her face more vivid in my mind. I might have told her that Hubert, at school, had been sought out and admired more than any other boy because he was not ordinary, that he’d been attractive and different in all sorts of ways. I might have begged her not to hate the memory of him when she ceased to love him.
I fell asleep. We played tennis and Hubert easily beat us. A car lay on its side, headlights beaming on the apes that scampered from the broken cage. On the bloody grass of the roadside verge the two dead faces still smiled. ‘You will know no blacker day,’ the voice of a schoolmaster promised.
In the morning, after breakfast, I packed my suitcase while Hubert sat smoking a cigarette in silence. I said goodbye to Lily in the kitchen, and to Mrs Plunkett. Pamela was in the hall when we passed through it.
‘Goodbye,’ she said. At breakfast she had seemed to have recovered her composure. She smiled at me now, saying she was sorry I was going.
‘Goodbye, Pamela.’
Hubert stood by the open hall door, not looking at her, gazing out into the sunlit garden. On the way to the railway station we talked again about incidents at school. He mentioned the two nurses we’d accompanied to their doorstep and the luck we’d had at the races. ‘A pity we wouldn’t have time for a gin and orange,’ he said as we passed the hotel.
On the slow train, close at first to the sea and then moving into the landscape that was just beginning to seem parched because of the heatwave, I knew that I would never see Hubert again. A friendship had come to an end because when a little more time went by he would be ashamed, knowing I would not easily forget how he had made his cousin a casualty of the war with his grandfather. There would always be an awkwardness now, and the memory of Hubert at home.
Their first holiday since their honeymoon was paid for by the elderly man they both called Uncle. In fact, he was related to neither of them: for eleven years he had been Dawne’s employer, but the relationship was more truly that of benefactor and dependants. They lived with him and looked after him, but in another sense it was he who looked after them, demonstrating regularly that they required such care. ‘What you need is a touch of the autumn sun,’ he had said, ordering Keith to acquire as many holiday brochures as he could lay his hands on. ‘The pair of you’re as white as bedsheets.’
The old man lived vicariously through aspects of their lives, and listened carefully to all they said. Sharing their anticipation, he browsed delightedly through the pages of the colourful brochures and opened out on the kitchen table one glossy folder after another. He marvelled over the blue of the Aegean Sea and the flower markets of San Remo, over the Nile and the pyramids, the Costa del Sol, the treasures of Bavaria. But it was Venice that most instantly caught his imagination, and again and again he returned to the wonder of its bridges and canals, and the majesty of the Piazza San Marco.
‘I am too old for Venice,’ he remarked a little sadly. ‘I am too old for anywhere now.’
They protested. They pressed him to accompany them. But as well as being old he had his paper-shop to think about. He could not leave Mrs Withers to cope on her own; it would not be fair.
‘Send me one or two postcards,’ he said. ‘That will be sufficient.’
He chose for them a package holiday at a very reasonable price: an air flight from Gatwick Airport, twelve nights in the fairyland city, in the Pensione Concordia. When Keith and Dawne went together to the travel agency to make the booking the counter clerk explained that the other members of that particular package were an Italian class from Windsor, all of them learning the language under the tutelage of a Signor Bancini. ‘It is up to you if you wish to take the guided tours of Signor Bancini,’ the counter clerk explained. ‘And naturally you have your own table for breakfast and for dinner.’
The old man, on being told about the party from Windsor, was well pleased. Mixing with such people and, for just a little extra, being able to avail themselves of the expertise of an Italian language teacher amounted to a bonus, he pointed out. ‘Travel widens the mind,’ he said. ‘I deplore I never had the opportunity.’
But something went wrong. Either in the travel agency or at Gatwick Airport, or in some anonymous computer, a small calamity was conceived. Dawne and Keith ended up in a hotel called the Edelweiss, in Room 212, in Switzerland. At Gatwick they had handed their tickets to a girl in the yellow-and-red Your-Kind-of-Holiday uniform.
